LG DR 7400

Author's product rating:   

Picture Playback	Good
Sound Level	Good
Ease of Use	Simple
Range of Features	Above Average
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	good price now down to around £99, looks nice
Disadvantages:	quite slow at ejecting disc from standby(i . e .  when not spinning)

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

when I got my LG DR7400 home, I was feeling rather apprehensive, were there going to be any more nasty surprises?

Remote Dimensions
21cm x 5cm

The best things about the LG DR7400 are its nice slimline design, which is understated and doesn't have any garish flashing lights or really naff glowing record buttons. Secondly, it comes with a very good remote control, as pictured on the left. Some remote controls for other brands of DVD recorders have had their functionality reduced by lowering the number of buttons on them. They believe that this makes it easier to use, because a remote with less buttons on it will look less daunting to a "techno-phobe". The reality is however, this makes it more difficult to use; rather than just pressing a button on the remote to zoom in, for example, you then have to press a button to bring up a menu, then scroll along until you find the option you want eg. zoom and then select the zoom level. This can be a rather time consuming and confusing process. I am pleased to say that the LG DR7400 doesn't suffer from this, if you want to zoom in all you have to do is press the zoom button on the remote, once for 2x and twice for 4x and again to go back to normal. Other buttons on the LG's remote that others leave out are: Eject, Instant Skip, FF, REW, Return, Display, Audio, subtitle, zoom, clear, Chapter Add, Repeat, A-B Repeat, Thumbnail, Marker (Bookmark) and Bookmark search. The LG's remote contains 3 buttons with asterisks over them, these buttons don't do anything.
Multibrand Functionality

The LGs remote also comes with controls for your TV with provision for Volume+/- ,Pr+/-. AV channel and Standby button. However, its only compatible with a handful of brands of tv's: LG, Zenith, Samsung, Sony and Hitachi. It doesn't work with my TV so is of no use to me. I dont' know why they bother putting these so-called "multi-brand" buttons onto remotes when they are restricted to such a small number of TVs. Do they really think that I'm going to go out an buy a brand new LG brand TV just so it works with this remote control?
Navigating

When you hold the remote, your thumb naturally falls onto the Enter button in the middle of the 4 way direction buttons. It is best to hold it in your left hand so your thumb can rest in between the play, pause and scan buttons. When the adverts come on, you can easily reach your thumb up to the instant skip button, which skips ahead 30 seconds each time. This is a much better way of fast forwarding through the adverts. The available Fast forward speeds are 2, 4, 8, 16, and 100x in that order, the same in reverse. If you press the REW button when fast forwarding it goes into REW mode at 2x, rather than reducing the FF speed like some other brands do. The 2x FF is very smooth, 4x is mostly smooth in SP recording quality but even smoother in the lower recording quality settings. There is no sound when you are fast forwarding, not even in 2x. After you have pressed the pause button, the FF and REW buttons can be used to activate the slow motion which works in both directions at speeds of 1/32, 1/16, 1/8, 1/4 and 1/2 in that order. The reverse slow motion is very useful for finding an exact frame when you are setting a thumbnail image or manually setting a chapter marker when you are editing the disc.

The remote feels responsive in most situations. You don't have to point the remote directly at the DVD recorder in order to make it work, you can even point it in the opposite direction, just as long there is a wall for the infra red signal to bounce off. The most noteable exception to this is the stop button. Whether you are watching a commercial DVD or one of your own home recorded DVD+RWs, the LG DR7400 takes ages to stop playing the video once you have pressed the stop button. It takes 2 seconds for it to stop showing the DVD video and return to the picture from the internal tuner/ scart. It takes a full 1.5 seconds for it to just go to a black screen after you have pressed the stop button. This is very strange and unnacceptable really. Everytime I press the stop button, I alway end up thinking that the remote control must have broken, because it continues to play the video for 1.5 secs after you have pressed it. Even now when I am used to it, my first response is to press the stop button again incase it didn't get it the first time. Even my really cheap DVD player can stop the video immediatley after you press the stop button. It is also slow to respond to when you press the 'marker' (bookmark) button - this means the bookmarks always end up a full second after where you want them to really be.

Hope this helps all who need some info xx